Overview of Labyrinth

Background

In the last decades, the advent of the World Wide Web has led public institutions and private actors (the latter also known as creative and cultural industries), to publish their media archives online, dramatically increasing the range of cultural contents that are available to the general public. In parallel with this process, the digital convergence has brought content producers and consumers to share and generate contents, working alongside the traditional paths of cultural markets and education.

The Labyrinth projects leverages the notion of “cultural and narrative archetypes”, situated at the intersection of narrative motifs, iconological themes and classical mythology, to support the construction of personal paths through digital archives.

On the technological side, the current shift towards semantic encoding opens the way to the creation of interfaces that allow the users to build personal paths in heritage collections by exploiting the relations over the artworks.

Project Overview

Targeted at the general audience, the design of Labyrinth 3D relies on two main features: the use of well-known visual codes for the representation of the maze and the insertion of elements of gamification into the user experience.

The web-based interface supports the exploration of the archive with a top-down approach which integrates the archetype-driven visit with the horizontal relations emergining over the items.

The 3-D environment consists of a virtual labyrinth that contains digital representations of the items in the archive, linked by pathways that represent the archetypal similarities among them. Targeted on the general audience, the project aims at encouraging the users to explore the media repository, as a way to promote personal cultural enrichment and cultural heritage dissemination. The system immerses the user into a virtual 3D labyrinth, where turning points and paths represent the semantic relations over cultural objects, with the goal of engaging the user in the exploration of the collection.

Coordinates

The Labyrinth project was funded by Regione Piemonte, Poli di Innovazione, Polo di Innovazione per la Cretività Digitale e la Multimedialià, POR-FESR 2007-2013. Project budget: 318.271,09 euros, 24 months (2012-2014).

Partnership

The partnership included a Research Institute and two SME:

Credits